To allow customers of financial institutions to better manage their respective financial accounts, many financial institutions offer notification services whereby alert messages are issued notifying their customers of activities (e.g. debit or credit card transactions, low deposit account balance) that have occurred on their respective financial accounts. To allow the customer to have timely receipt of the alerts, typically the customer configures the service to issue the alerts to the customer's mobile electronic device (e.g. mobile phone, smart phone, personal digital assistant). When the customer enters a zone in which audible alerts are prohibited (e.g. cinemas) or undesirable, (e.g. hospitals), the customer must either manually deactivate the sound/vibrate functions of the mobile phone or manually reconfigure the notification service to terminate the issuance of alerts. When the customer leaves the zone, the customer must then either manually reactivate the sound/vibrate functions of the mobile phone or manually reconfigure the notification service to continue the issuance of alerts. Since the customer might forget to deactivate/reactivate the sound/vibrate functions or to reconfigure the notification service, these approaches to controlling alert notifications are inconvenient.
Nadler (US 2009/0131080) describes automatically providing content and services to mobile devices based on the identity of the user and the location of the mobile device. The owner of a presence zone may provide to a presence zone service provider various parameters such as the coordinates of the presence zone, and the services that may be provided to a mobile device while in the presence zone. Mobile device users and presence zone owners may also provide a presence server with preference information. The presence zone service provider determines the location of the mobile device and associates the location with one or more presence zones. A presence detector tailors the content and services to be provided to the mobile device based on the presence zone, the properties of the zone (e.g. a restaurant), the identity of the mobile device user, and the specified preferences.
As examples, Nadler discloses that the presence zone may define a retail location in which the mobile device user may receive promotional messages for services that are available in the retail location. The presence zone may define a mandatory silence zone in which the mobile device is prohibited from originating phone calls and directs incoming calls to voice-mail or an alternate destination. The presence zone may define a quiet zone in which the mobile device is prevented from ringing unless over-ridden by the mobile device user. Incoming calls to the mobile device may be directed to the alternate destination while the device is in the quiet zone, and then directed to the mobile device when the device leaves the quiet zone.